Betty Friedan Quotes

My childhood wasn't very happy. It's a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town.

Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.

I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase.

I grew up as one of the few Jews in Edison, and I had people tell me they hated me because of my religion.

There's racism everywhere.

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life.

I did get in a few fights in school. Kids threw around anti-Semitic slurs, not knowing necessarily what they meant. It was probably just something they picked up somewhere, as kids do.

Yeah, I make fun of blacks, and why not? I'm not a black.

I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent.

I went to an all white school where I dealt with racism.

When I wasn't famous, I had a lot of friends, almost all of them Italian. The racism only started when I started to play football.

Most people don't think about race as much as I do. They don't have to.

There are too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely. That's what I don't like.

Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.

I doubted that the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical coon who blacks my shoes every morning was fit for citizenship.

You send missionaries among us to teach us your ways, and when we do so, we meet immovable discrimination.

The Jewish problem

I have no idea how one stops one group, one race, from hating another. The hatred between human groups has never been cured, except by time.

The two things I feared as a boy most were rattlesnakes and white people.

The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.

Growing up, at that time, I didn't want to be black because I was bullied, and I'd tell my mum that I wanted to be white like everyone else at school.

When I grew up in West Baltimore, anything associated - and I'm talking about my childhood - with white people 99 percent of the time was something malevolent, like it was an explanatory force for something bad.

I had a long time admiration for the Jewish people. Especially with their long time of courage, taking so much abuse for so long. I was only seven years old, but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.

I got bullied so much growing up for being a different color in a majority white school.